#Baseelements pdf#
#Baseelements pro#

All the pieces involved will also work on OS X, but the shell scripting would be different. PDFtk also supports handling different size pages of PDFs and combines them as a single document.Īlso of note, this example uses FileMaker Server installed on Windows Server. PDFtk is also capable of doing much more than combining PDFs, but for this example, that will be our end result. This version provides a command line interface which is fine for our server-side implementation. Finally, we will be integrating with a freely available and popular server-side program for manipulating PDFs, PDFtk server.

#Baseelements pro#

Also recommended is the use of FileMaker Pro Advanced for development, but this is not a requirement. This means that once we are done, clients won’t need to have the plugin installed, but for development, we will also have it installed on FileMaker Pro.

Next, we will be using the now open source Goya BaseElements (thanks Goya!) plugin installed on the server.PSOS) so we already assume that your environment includes FileMaker Server. First, this technique uses the Perform Script on Server script step (a.k.a.Now let’s get to building this thing! Can we build it? Performing the script on the server avoids hair-pinning and doubling the amount of network traffic required.

#Baseelements pdf#

Normally, you would need to download all PDF files to the client via container fields, export them somewhere where they can be manipulated and then combined and finally re-uploaded the result to another container field. It also does not matter if you have external storage enabled for container fields, since FileMaker takes care of that part for you.Īnother benefit is the savings in networks latency if this action were to be performed on the client.

Encode/decode Base64 to create text files on the flyīy performing this script on the server, there is no need for third party plugins to be installed on the client, which also makes it compatible across the platform and supports FileMaker Go and WebDirect.

Integrating with a 3rd party server-side program.

Performing command line scripts on a server.

Some of the techniques used in this example:

I believe this is a good example, in part because it combines several techniques, each of which has value.